#416 Creating the East Village 1955-1975

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Manhattan's Third Avenue El was torn down in 1955, those who were attracted to the culture of Greenwich Village -- with its coffeehouses, poets, and jazz music -- began flocking to the east side, attracted to low rents. And thus the East Village was born.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, a quick note to let you know that we'd love to have you join our expert tour guides
0:06.0	in the streets of New York on one of our Bowery Boys walks. Our licensed New York City tour guides
0:12.4	lead small groups on walks that we've developed especially for our Bowery Boys listeners.
0:18.0	Tours of gilded-age mansions, Jane Jacobs versus Robert Moses,
0:22.8	Greenwich Village, Historic Harlem, and so much more. Head to boweryboyswalks.com to join the fun.
0:31.6	In the fall of 1967, you could actually walk through the area of Manhattan called the East Village
0:38.8	and experience one or maybe all of the following things. You could see the new musical hair
0:45.6	at the public theater, then stumble out and twirl the astro place cues in the night air,
0:52.4	walk east, and stand in line on St. Mark's Place to luxuriate in the psychedelic light shows
0:59.2	at the electric circus and enjoy the music of the blue oyster cult. Then pick up an egg cream
1:06.1	a gem spa, or maybe a joint, then float through a haze toward the pea-side bookstore at Avenue A,
1:14.9	finally landing in Tompkins Square Park with its kaleidoscopic leaves, hurling yourself past
1:21.7	protesters leading anti-warchants to arrive at a drug-fueled bee-in. But this isn't just a story
1:30.0	about hippies and free love and classic rock. This is also about the communities that were already
1:38.5	on these blocks when the Bohemians arrived, and long before the name East Village was invented.
1:45.1	My grandfather, below Demir Domarkwal, was a Ukrainian immigrant that arrived in the states in the
1:50.4	late 1940s. He made his way to the New York area in the early 50s and he found that this area of
1:57.5	the village was a very mixed eclectic melting pot of Germans, Irish, and Ukrainians. The Selka
2:06.0	means rainbow in Ukrainian. Happy wedding day and a variety of different Slovak languages.
2:12.0	I believe that my grandfather named it Viselka because at the end of a rainbow, what do you typically
2:17.2	find? A pot of gold. The Bowry Boys episode 416, creating the East Village.
2:24.3	Hi there, welcome to the Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young. With the first of a two-part series on
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